Dear Felix,

good to read from you!

I know there are decent companies out there and I will NEVER work for another evil company again. No amount of money will make me do that.

It’s good to hear you’re not compromising your core values. For a moment, when reading your previous post, I thought you decided to accept a high-paying job in some company you despise. But you haven’t – you stick to your principles. That’s great.

I do like technology and I enjoy studying so I can take these exams. I am not studying and hating every second of it. Not at all.

This is also good. You’re not hating the field you’re in, in fact you like it. So there’s no need to look for something else. IT is a huge field and everyone needs IT services, so I believe you should be able settle in a decent company (or even a school or a public institution – are you eligible for that being a foreign citizen?) and earn decent money, to have a decent living.

Every company cares about profit, but there’s a difference between a company that also cares about its employees and one which exploits its employees for a bottom line. I hope you can find a company or institution where you’ll earn decent  money and feel respected rather than exploited.

If I don’t take care of myself, if I don’t get paid enough money, if I don’t study my a%% off, I’ll be in trouble. That’s the world we live in and not my perception of the world. … The world is unforgiving.

It’s true to a point – America is pretty hard-core capitalism and it’s probably harder to make it there than in Sweden or some more socially sensitive Western country. And it’s not socialism like the former USSR, which was in my opinion not a good system at all. In fact, it was a much worse system than free initiative and entrepreneurship that you get in capitalism. However, it could be that workers’ conditions are harder in the USA (I know there’s almost no paid maternity leave for example), so perhaps that’s one of the reasons you’re experiencing more of the “unforgiving world” than you would in some other country. I can’t really tell because I don’t live in the USA.

I get it and I appreciate your breakdown of the personality thing. I am not sure I fully understand it, but I get it. And you’re probably right. But I live in this terrible reality (terrible in a sense of the reality of capitalism, competition, greed, etc.) and I don’t know what else to do.

Try to understand that there are decent companies, who do care abut their employees. That America is not just soulless, greedy, cut-throat capitalism. Open yourself up to that possibility. I know it’s hard for you because you base your conclusions on your so-far experiences, and your negative experiences go far back into your childhood and youth, where you didn’t get help from your parents and were left to tend for yourself.

Your experience of the world started forming very early when you were a young child, when you experienced your parents as cold, brutal and lacking compassion for you. This was a base for later experiencing the world exactly the same: cold, brutal and unforgiving. The way you experienced your parents defined how you later experienced the world. Can you accept that notion?

Your experience of the world is colored by your experience of your parents. It’s as if you’re looking everything through a filter that distorts and skews the image, because it magnifies certain (negative) experiences, and leaves out other (positive) experiences. You get a distorted image, because of that filter. If you’d remove the filter, the image of the world would change.

I know the Universe doesn’t conspire against anyone, even though it feels like it sometimes, but what the hell is this? Why am going through all this? When does it end?

This is the result of the filter. It skews your perception. It feels horrible. You’re only experiencing negative things. It feels like the universe is conspiring against you, it feels like the universe is cold, harsh and lacks compassion (like your parents). It doesn’t give you any good news, it doesn’t give you a break. If you’d remove the filter, it would give you a different image.

I have pain in the kidneys. I am sure it’s nothing serious, but it’s still bothering me.

It’s most probably nothing physical. The adrenal glands are above the kidneys, and they produce adrenaline and cortisol – hormones of stress. They’re produced when we’re in the fight-or-flight, i.e. survival mode. You’ve been operating in this mode for quite a while…

I am struggling, but I am not giving up. I will never give up. I just wish that there was some, just a little tiny bit, of good news. Just anything that’s positive would help me. But it’s mostly been the other way around. 

What I’ve been trying to say is that you’re struggling against the skewed image of the world. If you’d remove the filter, you wouldn’t need to struggle that much.

What do you think? Can you accept that you might need to remove the filter, so you can experience a better, more positive reality?